Project Management Happy Hour

As a professional in today’s working environment, you are constantly bombarded by things that demand your attention, your action, the very limited moments in your finite life. (wow, heavy).

OK, so there are infinite demands on our time, but finite time. How do we balance those? SWOT analysis?! Of course not!

To help us understand how to effectively prioritize in today’s crazy world,  Kate and ...

AUDIO QUALITY NOTICE!  Apologies, we have a little static on one of the mics during our recording - sorry for the occasional audio issue. 

As a project manager, an organizational structure that will have a big impact on your life is the PMO. But if you aren’t used to working with a PMO, what should you expect? Are they going to make your life and projects easier, or crush you with red tape? If you are interviewing for...

In this episode, Kat and Kim talk to Erik Rueter about design thinking in our projects. 

What’s design thinking, you may be thinking? Design thinking is a methodology that focuses on the end users of a system when we are problem solving. Erik will share 5 different design thinking methods for understanding user needs in a way that not only helps your project provide better deliverables but can also help bu...

Although an essential part of our project-driven world, most project leaders didn’t set out to be one. For many of us, our first steps into project leadership won’t come with an official title. So, if we are not ‘officially’ project managers, how are we supposed to lead the project? 

There are a lot of answers to this question, but one approach all project leaders need to master is the art of managing with...

For the first time, Kate and Kim find an Agilist brave enough to join them on the podcast to talk about some really hard questions about working Agile vs Waterfall. Let’s get it on!

We ask the questions that PM’s want to ask - frustrated, annoyed PM’s who are told to work “agile” by people who maybe don’t even understand Agile - or Waterfall, for that matter.

In this refreshingly honest talk a...

Project Management is weird. You can have the same job title and be a very tactical execution-minded project manager - which is the way most of us start. Or you can be a strategic part of the leadership team, recognized for your ability to help executives make their vision a reality. 

So, how do you develop yourself from tactical implementer to strategic partner? 

This episode we are joined by...

Meetings. Love them or hate them, they are core to what we do as project leaders. We need to pull people together (real or virtually) to discuss, plan, check-in, and get things done. But as we know, when we get people together, sometimes their misbehaviors - “goblins” - tag along, too!

Being able to manage effective meetings can make or break us as PMs. And learning how to manage these misbehaviors in meet...

“What percent done are you?” 

Status reporting is a core skill (and responsibility) of project managers. It is an opportunity for you to check in with your team, and to build rapport and engagement with stakeholders. But it’s also something we often take for granted. 

In this episode, Kate and Kim talk about how to approach status reporting w...

Being a project manager is tough. You are assigned a team of people who may never have with each other (or you) before, and you need to lead them to accomplish a task, solve a problem, or create a new deliverable. And by definition, this is a unique task - so it hasn’t been done before, at least not in this way, for these stakeholders. 

In among these challenges is perhaps the toughest one: you have to lea...

It can be hard getting a project started correctly: getting the right executive and stakeholder sponsorship and support, getting them all to agree on the scope and approach, getting funding, approvals, and all the other things required to get a project off the ground.

You negotiate with other departments and get committed resource assignments and timelines. You finally get your amazing project off the grou...

Projects are hard. And a lot of them - maybe most of them - fail to live up to their expectations. Missed timelines, quality issues, budget overages, customer dissatisfaction - it seems sometimes like projects miss the mark more often than they hit it. But why is that? What can we learn from all those past projects that can help us make future projects more successful? 

This is the question Jim Johnson set...

Creative decision making is key to what we do in all our projects. According to FourSight, there are 4 distinct voices in the decision making process. Do you have these voices in the room when you make decisions? Do you know when you need all 4 voices - or only a couple specific ones? 

We are joined today by Teresa Lawrence who gave one of the most fun and engaging talks at this past year’s PMI Global Summ...

“I know the world is ending, but do you have wifi here?”

Sounds funny, but it’s deadly serious. Natural disasters impact critical infrastructure that we depend on every day: shelter, fresh water, food distribution, and power. These are the ones we think about. 

But what about communication? 

How do relief agencies, police, fire, and government coordinate a disaster response when t...

Decisions make or break your project - starting with the decision of whether or not to even do your project. Beyond that, we have planned decisions / phase gates and ad-hoc decisions that happen throughout the entire life of our project. And if you’ve been around long enough, you know that one bad decision can sink your whole project - or at least have it taking on water, fast. 

So, how should we approach ...

Yeah! One of our favorite guests, Tim Creasey, returns! This time we are talking about what happens if you realize, too late in the game, that you really didn’t consider Change Management enough in your planning cycle. 

It’s such a universal experience of a project manager to not have change management, and so many of us end up in these situations where we strug...